Deb Haaland: Keeping tribal voices front and center

Of all the losses this continent has suffered, the destruction of the Great Plains is among the starkest. When the federal government began its conquest of Indigenous peoples, it surmised that the “Indian problem”—wherein Native communities lived and thrived on lands sought by colonial settlers and the federal government—could be solved by destroying Native food sources and livelihoods. And so, men with guns killed tens of millions of bison. This set off a chain reaction of ecosystem degradation that, now intertwined with the present-day climate crisis, spelled catastrophe for ancestral homelands and the ecosystems we all depend on. For the CSKT, this loss was amplified by the federal government’s unilateral withdrawal of nearly 19,000 acres at the very heart of the Flathead Reservation in 1908.